Friday, December 24, 2010

As Gary pointed out—that I had
pointed out—in the previous post, “being a superpower collapse
predictor is not a good career choice.” Since then, I have been
tossing about in search of better career choice for myself. In this
time of high unemployment it is important to think out of the box and
look for opportunities to create a new market niche, preferably in a
high-wage segment of the economy such as finance, medicine or law.

For a very short while I entertained
the notion of establishing a new field of dentistry. Everybody knows
of endodontics, periodontics, orthodontics and so forth. I am not a
dentist; nevertheless, I thought that I might add one more:
scrimshawdontics. I would serve people who desire to have a schooner
under full sail scratched into the enamel of one of their upper
canines, a likeness of Herman Melville into the other, and, across
their upper incisors, a majestic scene of a harpoon boat chasing
after a great big whale across storm-tossed seas, men straining at
the oars, and, in the bow, a prominent peg-legged figure wielding a
harpoon! But I was forced to discard this idea as soon as I realized
just how few people would want to spend countless hours in a
dentist's chair with their mouth open while I scratch away at their
teeth with an etching needle.

And so I have tried to think of another
plan, and decided to borrow a page out of Matt
Savinar's book. After running a rather popular “doomer” site
for some years (the term “doomer” is self-applied in Matt's case;
he even referred to himself as a “Juris Doctor of Doom”) Matt
decided switch gears and to devote himself entirely to astrology. But
the field of astrology seems far too general to me; I want to
specialize further, and combine astrology with another discipline,
preferably in a high-wage segment of the economy. I also want to use
my technical and scientific education and put astrology on a more
sound scientific footing by informing it with certain key insights
from fields such as astrophysics and information theory. And so here
is my new profession: astroeconomist.
I will join the ranks of those who profitably combine astrology and
economics.

Astrology concerns
itself with the relative positions of planets within our solar system
and their mysterious effect on the course of human events. But let me
ask: Why do planets in this solar system exert greater influence on
the course of human events than the planets that orbit all other
countless stars within the billions of galaxies that populate the
universe? Why is proximity of stellar bodies to us a key factor? This
would plausibly be the case if the influence of planetary alignment
were known to act through some known physical mechanism whose effect
were attenuated by distance, such as the spread of facts of some sort, of
the general form “A causes B through mechanism X.” But being unable to
attest to the existence of any such X, we are forced to concede that
the statement “A causes B” is not a piece of information but, in
a strict epistemological sense, the absence of a fact—a statement of ignorance, of the general form “It is not known that A causes B.” Now, while information requires
time and energy to propagate through space, and degrades in quality
long before that energy becomes diffuse enough to be detectable as
single photons, as it does in the vastness of interstellar space,
ignorance is not bound by any physical constraints and is in fact
instantaneous at all points in the universe. Therefore, we could
justifiably assume that it is not just the nearby planets that guide
our destinies but all planets in all solar systems in all galaxies,
in equal measure.

You are probably used to thinking that
the universe is finite; very large, but not infinitely large.
However, it may well be the case that the
universe is infinitely large, extending infinitely in all
directions in both time and space. The leap from very, very big to
infinite may seem like a technicality, but it is really a quantum
leap, because infinite things have some dramatically different
properties from finite ones. For instance, the national debt is very
large, but it is not infinite; if it were, the interest on it, for
any non-zero rate of interest, would be infinite as well and national
default would be instantaneous. Aside from their insidious bigness,
infinite things also tend to be infinitely complex, and contain an
infinite amount of information. Take, for instance, the
transcendental constant π (3.14159265...). It is an infinitely long
non-repeating sequence of digits. When calculated with infinite
precision, converted to binary and treated as digital data π is
guaranteed contain an infinite number of each of the following:

A
high-quality video of you in flagrante delicto with every other
person that ever lived

An
infinite number of Wikileaks documents containing irrefutable proof
that Senator Joseph Lieberman is a Mossad agent, Obama is from the
vicinity of the star Betelgeuse, while Dick Cheney is, in some
unfathomable fashion, not from but the
Crab Nebula itself

An
infinite number of copies and variants of this very article

More
to the point, an infinite universe contains an infinite number of
galaxies, stars, and planets, and, it follows, an infinite number of
simultaneous planetary alignments. If, as I argue above, all of these
alignments, through the force of ignorance, act together in concert irrespectively of distance and
time, then the signal conveyed by astrological data is complete
randomness: pure, high-grade noise. It is not just any old ignorance
but the purest, highest-grade, most reliably fact-free signal
imaginable.

And
this brings us to astrology's sister discipline, which likewise
benefits from purity of ignorance: economics. It is well-known that
stocks picked by expert money managers do slightly worse, overall,
than stocks picked by monkeys throwing darts. (Good monkey! Here's
your bailout!) The reason for this should be obvious: monkeys produce
better results because of the superior quality of ignorance that
drives their decision-making process. Similarly, economists who
struggle with econometric models and statistical data collected by
government and industry are sometimes accidentally correct in their
predictions, raising expectations and creating false hopes. But if
instead economists plugged in the pure nonsense of astrological data
averaged across an infinite universe, they could easily achieve a
six-sigma rating, being repeatably wrong 99.99966% of the time. And
wouldn't that be exciting!? Oh but wait a minute...

Come
to think of it, perhaps astroeconomics is not a promising career
choice either. Back to square one, then...

Saturday, December 18, 2010

[This is a guest post from Gary, who presents data that indicate that the US military empire is already past its peak and may collapse suddenly. Gary uses a methodology for calculating peak empire that is similar to the Hubbert curve which successfully predicted Peak Oil for both the US and, more recently, the world.

It should be noted that the DOD base structure reports on which Gary's analysis is based don't include Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the secret (black) installations all over the world, but it is unclear whether the inclusion of these data would change the picture materially.

As far as the speed of imperial collapse, it varies: Rome took five centuries to collapse but USSR took just a couple of years. Alfred W. McCoy,Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently wrote: "empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal,
two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the
Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years
for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003." My hunch is that McCoy's 22-year estimate is overly generous, and that the collapse of the USA will set a speed record, unfolding over just a handful of very strange days. When will this happen? According to Chris Hedges, it could happen any time now.]

Predicting Collapse

In February, 2009 Dmitry Orlov said the following about predicting the collapse of the US empire: “I have learned from experience – luckily, from other people’s experience – that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA (“F” is for “Former”). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn’t make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.”

As far as predicting the collapse of the US empire, Russian academic Igor Panarinhas been predicting it for 2010, and Johan Galtung has predicted it will collapse before 2020. Hubbert predicted in 1974 that global peak oil was incompatible with constantly growing money, triggering a cultural crisis (See Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon).

Andrei Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980 at the age of 42. Nevertheless, at the risk of making a poor career choice, I will attempt to offer a methodology for determining peak US empire, if not a prediction for its demise. Now that global peak oil is history perhaps it’s time to work on predicting peak empire instead. If you followed the work of Joseph Tainter, he offered the theory of diminishing and eventually negative marginal return to territorial growth and complexity of societies. (See The Collapse of Complex Societies) He offered the following graph to illustrate:

As a result he expected complex societies to reach a peak in size and then begin to decline, similar to an oil peak.

He offered the following examples to demonstrate the principle with historical examples of defunct empires:

From: Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Shown above are the territorial areas of the Roman, Ottoman, Russian, and US Empires. The curve for the Russian Empire ends abruptly at 1917 where the curve for its heir—the USSR—takes off. The main point is that empires follow a typical bell curve type of shape.US Empire

In the case of the US empire, it has not continued to expand by territorial acquisition. The last territory acquired was the Marshall Islands in 1947, which then became a UN Trust Territory, followed by Independence in 1986. What has continued to expand is the presence of US military installations all over the world. As the recently deceased analyst Chalmers Johnson explained, the US is an “empire of bases”, not an empire of colonies. The US has 800-1000 foreign military bases and 4-5000 bases in the US. Colonies are so passé these days. Why bother with colonies when you can impose your will with a few bases, and you don’t have to manage the whole country. Besides you can outsource most everything to contractors, so you don’t even need the consent of the governed. All you need is their tax money, which the sheeple continue to provide with barely a bleat.

Looking at the DOD Base Structure reports it is possible to graph the total acreage owned by the US military both in the US, in foreign countries, and in US foreign territories. Since both foreign countries and territories are occupied, I will lump them together. It is also valid to use total military acreage including the US, since the 50 states of the US are essentially occupied territory of the US military as well.

I was unable to find data before 1957, but total acreage under management by the US military had a recent peak in 2007, while foreign acreage peaked in 2004. This data is from official US DOD base structure reports, which according to Chalmers Johnson leaves out quite a bit, but from a relative point of view over time, it is probably adequate. I have included the excel sheet data, and others are welcome to add to the data and do a more thorough job graphing this data.

Military spending

Looking at US military spending below, it has continued to rise, despite the recent decline in acreage under management. This is entirely consistent with Tainter’s theory of declining marginal utility to expanding empires, as imperial overstretch becomes more and more expensive, and returns to expenditures begins to decline, and even become negative. It would be entirely consistent for the expenditures to continue to rise as the empire attempts to hold onto its existing level of military acreage, until interest on the debt causes a default, and then expenditures also collapse.

Imperial Reserves

Like oil, the empire has reserves to continue fueling the military machine. It has its AAA bond rating in order to continue deficit spending by selling Treasury bonds to foreign countries, although the rating agencies have taken somewhat of a hit on their credibility after the financial crisis. Foreign governments may also be thinking twice about the future viability of the dollar. It has the Federal Reserve to continue creating money out of thin air by key strokes on a computer, and engaging in open market operations like “quantitative easing” and purchasing existing treasuries, or even monetizing the debt by buying treasury bonds directly from the US government, giving it more money to play with. Finally they have the credulous and supplicant taxpayers who continue to fund their own demise by turning their tax dollars over to an empire, which throws it down three rat holes simultaneously: The $1 trillion dollar annual military budget, the Afghanistan War, and the bankster bailouts. Like the oil reserve/production ratio, the empire has a reserve/territorial expansion ratio which is declining rapidly. If interest rates increase adequately, the interest on the debt is going to swallow up all of tax revenues, such that a tax increase might be required. Will the sheeple rebel then? We’ll see. In any case, I welcome others to comment on the viability of military acreage as a measure of peak empire, and to expand on the analysis.

[Update: Gary did some more plotting, and here are the results: graphing acreage vs military spending shows diminishing total returns on military spending, and negative marginal returns since 1991 at least.

One more thing to keep in mind: as William Pfaff, writing in Foreign Affairs, puts it, "U.S. military bases have generated apprehension and hostility and fear
of the United States, and they have facilitated futile, unnecessary,
unprofitable, and self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now
seem to be inviting enlarged U.S. interventions in Pakistan, Yemen, and
the Horn of Africa. The 9/11 attacks, according to Osama bin Laden
himself, were provoked by the "blasphemy" of the existence of U.S.
military bases in the sacred territories of Saudi Arabia. The global
base system, it seems, tends to produce and intensify the very
insecurity that is cited to justify it." Not only is American Empire post-peak, but, just like the Soviet Empire before it, it was operated at a loss throughout, even as it grew, in each case making national bankruptcy just a matter of time.]

Thursday, December 09, 2010

This hefty tome was recently published by Féasta, Ireland's Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability. It contains two articles by me: the first is a text version of the presentation I gave at the Féasta conference in Dublin two summers ago, which you can read right on this blog.

My second article in this volume—Sailing craft for a post-collapse world—is a long piece that I wrote exclusively for this publication. It spells out the transportation options that will still exist once fossil fuels are no longer available, concentrating on sail transport. It pulls together pertinent information that is currently scattered across many academic disciplines, and is also informed by my personal experience as an ocean sailor and live-aboard who does all of his own maintenance.

Fleeing Vesuvius draws together many of the ideas our members
have developed over the years and applies them to a single question—how can we bring the world out of the mess in which it finds itself?
Fleeing Vesuvius confronts this mess squarely, analyzing
its many aspects: the looming scarcity of essential resources such as
fossil fuels—the lifeblood of the world economy; the financial crisis
in Ireland and elsewhere; the collapse of the housing bubble; the urgent
need for food security; and the enormous challenge of dealing with
climate change.

The solutions it puts forward involve changes to our economy and
financial system, but they go much further: this substantial,
wide-ranging book also looks at the changes needed in how we think, how
we use the land and how we relate to others, particularly those where we
live. While it doesn't discount the complexity of the problems we face, Fleeing Vesuvius
is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It will arm readers with the
confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable
alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting
systems. It's a book that can be read all the way through or used as a
resource to dip in and out of.

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

[Another guest post by
Sandy. There is something deliciously ironic in this story of a
former American corporate efficiency expert transplanting himself to
a place where time never goes any place special and patience is too
cheap to meter—and being happy there! Here's the executive summary
for all you “TL;DR” hyper-efficient power web surfers: as you
prepare to leave the US behind—whether physically (recommended) or just
mentally—you should be ready to slough off you compulsively American
old self and be prepared to grow yourselves a new, better-adapted,
saner one.]

For the past five years I
have made my home in Barnaul, a town in the Altai region of Siberia.
Much about life here initially chafed against some deeply engrained
cultural assumptions that I carried around with me. No matter how
hard I’ve tried, sometimes I just couldn't quite fathom the
alienness of the Russian perspective.

I quickly became aware of
an almost palpable sentiment that here in Siberia there is space
enough, and time, for anything to occur—and a certain
resiliency to carry one through it. The immense distances and open
expanses provide spatial and temporal horizons that seem to recede
forever. The endless boreal forests of the Siberian taiga and the
barren steppes are not typical “environments” in the Western
sense. They are not places. They have no frames of reference. These
enormous expanses seemed to set the rhythm for much of the daily life
here, which is often spent waiting countless hours, or walking
endless kilometers, or just sitting there. Americans would never have
the patience for any of it.

Given this perspective, I
found it curious that people here spent so much of their time crammed
into very close quarters in the bustling city of Barnaul, located
between Novosibirsk and the point where the borders of China,
Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together amid the snow-capped ridges of
the Altai mountains.

How do you suppose people
here experience personal space and time in their daily life? I will
always remember my first of many trips around town in a public
transport van called “gazelle.” Pleasantly named for its size,
which is diminutive compared to a full-size city bus, “gazelle”
accommodates as many as fourteen passengers, always uncomfortably.
Although there are plenty of automobiles in town, the majority of
people do not own vehicles or drive. “Comfort” is a term that
Siberians do not appreciate as we do in America; it is not something
they expect or particularly seek. They accept certain things as
given. They can be rather disparaging of our American habit of
whining over the lack of comfort. They see it as a weakness in our
national character.

The first time I climbed
aboard a “gazelle” with my wife Anna, I suddenly found myself in
very close quarters with about a dozen complete strangers. Keeping
our heads down to avoid bashing them into the low ceiling, we took
off like a shot through traffic barely before the door was closed.
The other passengers took no notice of our assault on their space as
we stumbled across their legs and packages to split between us the
last remaining seat in the back of the van. Here, the phrase “public
intimacy” takes on a new meaning: clearly, close physical proximity
or bodily contact is not something Siberians shy away from—not in
the gazelle, or the tram, or the bus, or the theatre. Our fellow
riders seemed unfazed by their close quarters during this galloping
ride through town, maintaining a stoic and formal outward appearance
in the midst of this forced intimacy.

I imagined this to be a
hold-over from the Soviet era when there was little expectation of
privacy. People seemed to understand the importance of keeping up a
dispassionate public appearance, especially in close quarters. They
were unruffled by the physical proximity. But their complete lack of
emotional closeness or openness in such circumstances was a bit of a
surprise. As an American, my first thought upon entering the womb of
the gazelle was to introduce myself, and then to apologize for
interrupting their ride, but luckily Anna stopped me before I had a
chance to embarrass myself. The silence was deafening, with not a
word exchanged among any of the accidental traveling companions. Even
speaking with the person seated on your lap is kept to a minimum
because others would be forced to listen to your conversation. The
erupting blast of a cell phone’s ring tone made everyone reach for
their purse or pocket. The unlucky recipient answered, trying to
speak softly and to end the conversation quickly.

This was my first
encounter with the different structure of personal space within the
public domain of the city, and coping with the huge mismatch between
it and my expectations became more and more difficult with each
passing day. It wasn't just when taking public transportation that my
conception of my personal space was being tested to destruction. It
seemed to be under assault in innumerable circumstances, but
especially when I found myself standing in a queuesomewhere,
waiting for service.

There is so much idle
waiting in Siberia that, as one Russian writer describes it, here the
empty passage of time reveals its “authentic substance and
duration.” But all this waiting did not seem to
inconvenience the local population as much as it bothered me. It
appeared as though our often frantic, Western sense of urgency was
relatively absent here, and that enormous amounts of time were
regularly squandered without giving rise to frustration. If the bus
did not come as scheduled we could idle away another thirty minutes
anticipating the arrival of the next one, or just walk home. We could
easily linger for forty-five minutes in line at the telecom office to
pay our monthly phone bill. If the hot water or heat in our apartment
building shut off without warning (as it frequently did) we could do
without it for several days or even a week until it would be equally
unexpectedly restored.

What I found most striking
was that all this waiting apparently did not upset the locals as it
would Americans. Even as time seemed to nearly stand still, people
would just wait it out. Everything seemed to be taken in stride;
things would work themselves out sooner or later. I observed this
attitude daily in the behavior of all those around me. There was
almost never the need to rush; there was time enough for everything
to get done. “Everything will be fine” was Anna’s constant
refrain in response to my endless anxiety and frustration.

I sensed an unusual
attitude here for ignoring or perhaps for denying time’s plodding
passage, which became particularly apparent during the endless
waiting in queues—at banks, ATMs, ticket counters, the phone
company, the post office, the housing registration office, the tax
office, medical clinics, and at the innumerable public notary offices
which officially certify all documents. And I too waited, like
everyone else, because almost everything here must be done in person,
and almost nothing here can be accomplished by phone, or by mail, or
via the Internet. It was as if these modern efficiencies have not
been invented yet, and perhaps never will be. Apparently, there does
not seem to be any premium on “saving time.” The massive state
bureaucracies and even the commercial businesses here require that
you physically present yourself and wait somewhere if you want to pay
bills or to conduct any other business; and make sure you can pay in
cash, because nobody accepts checks or credit cards.

Not only was such waiting an assault on my patience, but on my sense of personal space as well. People stand literally breathing down one another’s necks, in such close physical proximity to each other that they are very often touching. When it is finally your turn to approach the service window, other people often flank you on either side, watching everything that transpires. They might even interrupt your transaction, finding any opportunity to make contact with the person on the other side of the window before their turn. This seeming impatience, or perhaps a lack of concern for others, seemed at odds with the general disinterestedness in time’s passage that I witnessed daily, but it turns out to be another thing entirely: it's just that your time at the counter is not strictly delineated as yours exclusively but overlaps with that of others around you.

There was seldom any
linearity to these queues, which look more like rugby scrums than
actual lines. There was certainly no queuing theory informing
waiting, as there is in America, no rope-barriers or other
accoutrements of control. Something that looks like a queue often
materializes spontaneously. As you approach a service window or enter
a waiting area, you find that people are not necessarily standing in
single file. Some of them might be sitting idly to the side, or
outside having a smoke, or leaning against a wall, or haphazardly
milling around. You have to inquire who is last in the queue, and
often find out that nobody really knows or cares, or that the person
or persons in question just stepped out but will come back later. The
Russian queue is not so much a physical as a mental construct, its
details scattered across many distracted minds. When the office
closes for “dinner” for an hour or two in the middle of the
workday, the queue dissolves, then spontaneously reconstitutes itself
after the dinner break is over.

Back in the USA I always
felt that a queue, like time itself, has to be well-structured,
arranged, managed, and always moving forward productively. Space and
time both have to be well organized for us, for we Americans, it
seems, are incapable of enjoying so-called “free time.” For us,
free, unscheduled time is wasted time—time not filled with
meaningful content or purposeful activity. Even American vacations
are routinely crammed full of productive activities, and good
planning is seen as a crucial element in recreating with efficiency
and purpose.

In America,
time-consciousness is run strictly by the clock. Is Siberian time our
clock-time, or is it informed by natural and circadian rhythms rather
than by a strictly linear, mechanical progression? I surmised that
there are no unambiguous expectations of strict linear continuity
here. What at first appeared to me as interruptions in the queue, for
example, or a general disregard for overall time management, might
not have been construed in this way at all by the locals. This was further
confirmed in other circumstances. For example, when speaking by phone
with Russian colleagues or friends about arranging a meeting or
rendezvous, they would invariably suggest getting together
immediately rather than scheduling something for later. I found this
to be true even of busy executives. Trains and government offices
have schedules, and mostly run on schedule—except when they don't,
but it doesn't occur to anyone that creating more schedules, and then
running on them, is something that they should be wanting to do.

People kept telling me:
“Sandy, this is Siberia; you can’t plan things here.” It was
hard to absorb the message that the American control of time’s
passage is illusory, that the flow of events from past to future can
suddenly be interrupted, come to a halt, or change direction. After
all, the flow of heat, electricity, and water certainly can, and
often does. If Siberian experience of time is more naturally dynamic
than our artificial clock-time, this might explain their seemingly
paradoxical attitude toward time’s passage.

Siberians seem to have a
split consciousness of time, as though there were two concurrent
experiences of temporal movement. One is an archaic, pastoral sense
of timelessness, associated with a more feral existence in the taiga
and the steppe, lived in close proximity to nature and its cycles.
The other is a nascent and constraining sense of clock time, with a
focus on punctuality and productivity that is finding a tentative and
clumsy foothold in the complex framework of urban bureaucracies here.
Is it just the nature of life in the city that creates such temporal
incongruities and juxtapositions?

I began to see real
challenges to the deeper cultural transformation that Siberians have
embarked upon. Or was this transformation being thrust upon them,
making the incongruities even more severe? Could Russia, could
Siberians, continue to survive in a world rife with such
contradiction? Should we presumptuously drag them kicking and
screaming into our long-gone twentieth century?

For me this was not simply
a rhetorical question. The steady gallop of Western-inspired
progress is quietly overtaking Siberia, more rapidly each day.
“Business lunches” are now advertised by new American-owned
cafes with the promise that they are “served in fifteen minutes.”
Credit cards are being offered more liberally by lending institutions
advertising “quick financing.” A pricey fitness club called
Aurora is all the rage in Barnaul, claiming “fast results.”
(Of course, my friend Keith and I—the only two Americans in
town—are both members.)

I feel that things are
fast reaching critical mass here, with what remained of long-standing
traditions eroding while society moves chaotically into our
Western historical present. What, if anything, could or should be
done to change the course of these events, or to circumvent such a
cultural transformation? I can hypothesize that the tensions created
by life in the increasingly anonymous urban sprawl of Barnaul, which
still seemed in some respects so foreign to these people, is
beginning to create fissures between the generations and between
newly emerging classes of citizens. But I can also imagine that this
sense of "quickening" is just part of the ebb and flow—of
Siberia living through its own version of the 1950s, made possible by
Russia's sudden prosperity, but that it is just a moment, and that,
once it passes, Siberia will once again relapse into its age-old
timelessness.